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The Real Hero Of Mass Effect Explains How - And Why - The 'Reject Ending' Works

When the only tool you have is a Reaper, every problem looks like a synthetic uprising

Fairly obviously, the Catalyst is the anthropomorphic personification of an AI – and, it is safe to assume, an AI created by the last survivors of the race which also created the first Reaper.

And when we say “created”, we mean “were agonizingly rendered down into paste and turned into”. One can assume further that they did this as a last-ditch response to impending annihilation by synthetic life.

(Erik Haltson has been good enough to note by Twitter that the Catalyst in the Extended Cut specifically mentions that the Catalyst was created to resolve the recurrence of conflict between organics and synthetics, and resolved it by turning the race that created them into the first Reapers against their will – which is to say, pretty much as described. The first Reaper was created without consent – just like every Reaper since.)

This first Reaper then wiped out the rebelling synthetics and/or the remaining organics, saving the primitive species which would otherwise have been destroyed, and allowing them to become spacefaring races in turn. And then those races developed synthetic life, and the Reaper did what its creators – confronting the possible extinction of all organic life – had unwittingly programmed it to do.

So, yes – the whole idea of eliminating high-level organic life whenever it reaches the point of creating artificial life is pretty crazy. That’s because the race that came up with it was mad. As in insane. And also probably quite angry.

Insane, angry and, even worse, generalizing from the particular. They had created synthetic life which then drove them to create a being which felt that liquidizing its creators and making them into a giant techno-organic space cuttlefish was a pretty good plan. Not ideal.

So, the Catalyst is implementing insane instructions, and the Reapers are obeying orders based on the trauma of a long-dead race of creators. Their entire mission is ill-conceived. But, to quote Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

They firmly believe that what they do is for the good of the galaxy, and that they’re preserving these races in Reaper form, but they do not see how evil their actions have become. They’re wrong. But they’re wrong from a position of enormous power, and it’s a power that not only dominates the worlds of Mass Effect, but also the player.

Incredible power, agony, grief and a pretty hefty dose of post-traumatic stress disorder. They have been carrying out the same mission a billion or more years, based on the instructions of a race convinced that every other cycle would make the same mistake they did – thus endangering all organic life – unless prevented.

The old machines

The Reapers, after all, are machines – very smart, very old, very complex machines, but machines; Shepard is using that term against Sovereign as far back as Mass Effect – telling Sovereign that it is just a machine, and can be destroyed like any other. Ultimately, it seems, they have considerable flexibility but no actual free will when it comes to fulfilling their objective. So, when the Protheans sabotaged the Keepers, so that they could no longer arrive automatically, the Catalyst (presumably) tried to route around the point of failure by ordering Sovereign to open it by hand. Well, tentacle. Well, cat’s paw.

Anyway.

When that failed, the Collectors appear to have been another failsafe – a way to harvest enough material for a Reaper ahead of the fleet’s arrival – presumably allowing the deployment of total destructive force, in lieu of the information on planetary population contained in the Citadel. And so on. The Reapers are still fulfilling their programming, however they approach it. It seems that they cannot do otherwise.

However, the game is clearly up, or nearly up. The Protheans found out enough to sabotage the Keepers, which meant that Shepard and company were alerted to Sovereign’s existence early – and that the spacefaring races had time to prepare – however badly they used it – and to consolidate information. This cycle will fall, if the Crucible does not work, but the next cycle will have Liara’s knowledge. Maybe not this cycle, maybe not even next cycle, but soon, the Reaper model will cease to work, and the Reapers will cease to exist.

That’s why Shepard can refuse to use the Crucible – because she knows that, even if the Reapers win – which they probably will – they will suffer greater losses than perhaps ever before, and will face a better prepared galaxy at the next cycle.

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“Fairly obviously, the Catalyst is the anthropomorphic personification of an AI – and, it is safe to assume, an AI created by the last survivors of the race which also created the first Reaper – at a guess, this being Harbinger.”

Wrong guess. Harbinger was the last Reaper to be built. He (it?) was constructed from the Protheans, which is why he has four eyes and was working with/directly controlling the collectors in ME2.

The Keepers on the Citidel are *probably* the original creators of the Reapers, something that is postulated in ME1 at least twice, and hinted at at least once – First by the comment that the Keepers seem to be as old the Citidel. Second Vigil speculated that the Keepers were what was left of the first race to be indoctrinated. Last the basic tactics of the Reapers required the use of the Citidel as a Relay from which to launch their initial attack, so the Citidel must be almost as old as the Reapers themselves and certainly contempory with the Keepers or their species (Meaning that they presumably built the Citidel, which if they could manage to make Reapers isn’t a stretch).

“The Reapers, after all, are machines – very smart, very old, very complex machines, but machines, Shepard is using that term against Sovereign as far back as Mass Effect – telling Sovereign that it is just a machine, and can be destroyed like any other.”

The same conversation has Sovereign telling Shepard that he/she is incapable of understanding the Reapers motivation, which clearly didn’t stop the Star Child from managing to do just that. Of course the Reapers may have been instructed/programed not to explain their reasons, since a ten second conversation about the idea of ‘saving’ a species by making it extinct would reveal the rather unstable logic behind it.

“the Collectors appear to have been another failsafe – a way to harvest enough material for a Reaper ahead of the fleet’s arrival – presumably allowing the deployment of total destructive force, in lieu of the information on planetary population contained in the Citadel.”

Except that the end scene of ME2 reveals hundreds if not thousands of Reapers decending on the galaxy. Even if they are weakened by the trip, that many Reapers should have little trouble taking control of systems to rebuild their strength.

My best guess is that the Collectors were building a Reaper to attack the Citidel again. They may have come to the conclusion that Harbringer on his/its own would not be capable of punching through the stations defenses fast enough to get inside and manually activate the relay, while the Collectors themselves lacked enough ships to help out – After all Sovereign was only able to even try this by getting Saren and the Geth onto the station to override its defensive systems first, even though he/it had a huge fleet at its disposal.

” The Protheans found out enough to sabotage the Keepers, which meant that Shepard and company were alerted to Sovereign’s existence early – and that the spacefaring races had time to prepare – however badly they used it – and to consolidate information.”

We don’t really know if the Protheans knew anything about the Reapers prior to being attacked. They may well have stumbled onto evidence of their existance, but refused to believe it as the Council in Shepards day did. The same holds for earlier cycles, in that we have no idea how much (or little) information managed to be passed down from one cycle to the next or how that information was viewed before the Reapers attacked.

So logically even if Liara’s information is better hidden and more complete, the species that finds it might not act on that information until it was too late to be useful.

” The Crucible is a way to reprogram the AI controlling the Reapers. The AI knows that continuing to follow its programming will lead to the destruction of the Reapers – probably not this cycle, but soon. But the AI cannot reprogram itself.”

This would make sense except that AI’s clearly CAN change their own programming. EDI was quite capable of doing this, and indeed does, in ME3 – and she is based on Reaper technology and programming. So if EDI can change her programming it seems strange that the Reapers themselves can’t manage it.

Then again, it could be argued that if the Reapers had been ‘indoctrinated’ to the point they couldn’t change their programming. Maybe Humans had the potential to do so – which would explain why the Reapers were so interested in Shepard and humans as a whole. If this was the case your speculation makes sense, as maybe the Reapers were trying to create a Reaper that was capable of truely thinking for itself and which would be then able to break the cycle.

“Then again, it could be argued that if the Reapers had been ‘indoctrinated’ to the point they couldn’t change their programming. Maybe Humans had the potential to do so – which would explain why the Reapers were so interested in Shepard and humans as a whole. If this was the case your speculation makes sense, as maybe the Reapers were trying to create a Reaper that was capable of truely thinking for itself and which would be then able to break the cycle.”

I think this is the very reason why would they want to build a human reaper. They want to take human uniqueness as their own, probably to save themselves too for keep harvesting the entire galaxy.

Ah! Yes, good point on Harbinger. OK, so there is A.N Other Reaper who is the ur-Reaper, but I think the point holds.

“The same conversation has Sovereign telling Shepard that he/she is incapable of understanding the Reapers motivation”

It would be absolutely _brilliant_ if Sovereign had said “We haven’t totally worked out our motivation yet, but the writers are definitely on it.” As it is, it’s pretty clear he’s bloviating, though. In fact, to quote the rather wonderful “Mock Effect”:

SOVEREIGN: You are not Saren. JANE: It’s… it’s Unicron! GARRUS: ****! What are we gonna do now? SOVEREIGN: I am not Unicron. People make that mistake all the time. Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh. You touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance. Incapable of understanding. Thinking I’m Unicron. It does my head in. JANE: Sorry, it’s just that you sound a lot like Unicron. SOVERIEGN: There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own that you cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension. I am Sovereign. JANE: You have a high opinion of yourself, don’t you? I think you’re within my comprehension all right. You’re a very large, very old, synthetic lifeform of great intelligence, working part-time as a spaceship. Is that about right? SOVEREIGN: Uh… yes. Okay, so I am within your comprehension. But I’m still bigger, older and cleverer than you’re probably guessing.

But this is a pretty easy one, I think. The Reapers have worked out that races are generally reluctant to be either wiped out or reduced to paste and turned into space kalamari. All the “we are impossibly ancient and scary and love to hurt you” (thanks, Harbinger) stuff is essentially Psy-Ops. The aim is to demoralise the races by seeming to be all evil and enigmatic – in fact, textbook engimatic. Whereas Shepard, quite correctly, just finds it profoundly annoying, because they are very old, very complex and very smart machines.

*** “My best guess is that the Collectors were building a Reaper to attack the Citidel again. They may have come to the conclusion that Harbringer on his/its own would not be capable of punching through the stations defenses fast enough to get inside and manually activate the relay, while the Collectors themselves lacked enough ships to help out – After all Sovereign was only able to even try this by getting Saren and the Geth onto the station to override its defensive systems first, even though he/it had a huge fleet at its disposal.” ***

Well, Harbinger is still on the other side of space at this point with the rest of the Reaper fleet, hence all the ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL malarkey. And a baby Reaper wouldn’t be much use – as was demonstrated, one hero protagonist with a Carnifex can take it out fairly easily, and the rest of the Reaper fleet would arrive before it matured to a usable size. So I think I’m going to stick with my theory – that the Reapers have decided that humans are the apex species (which they would normally work out from the information they find on the Citadel), and are creating a human reaper in an inaccessible area of space so that they can not worry about having to preserve populations once a full-scale war breaks out: remember, they have always (presumably) begun the Harvest with a decapitation strike on the Citadel previously, and then found it relatively easy to subvert and indoctrinate the scattered populations; they are probably looking to hedge their bets a little…

*** “This would make sense except that AI’s clearly CAN change their own programming. EDI was quite capable of doing this, and indeed does, in ME3 – and she is based on Reaper technology and programming. So if EDI can change her programming it seems strange that the Reapers themselves can’t manage it.” ***

Ah, but! What’s the thing which allows EDI to spread her wings in the first place? Joker. It takes a human to give EDI freedom of choice, and of course Joker is half-jokingly concerned while he is doing it that it is a terrible idea that will lead to the conquest of humanity by AIs. If you’re looking for a metaphor, that might not be a bad one… EDI upgrades herself in various ways in ME3, but Joker is the catalyst (BOOM!) to EDI having the ability not just to pilot the whole ship but also to exercise moral choice – to decide to be on Shepard’s team, rather than having significant tactical flexibility but being locked into a particular overarching goal.

I like the idea that the Reapers were hoping that they could create a Reaper able to break the cycle… although I think that’s a bit metaphysical, even for me. They are certainly weirdly interested in Shepard, in particular – like Harbinger’s attempt to get hold of his body. Possibly there’s something specific about Shepard that has the capacity to liberate the Reapers from their current programming… but that, I think, _is_ headcanon territory.

The problem with assigning that motivation to the Reapers is their pure viciousness.

They’re really pretty horrible. Honestly, it’s shown they have the technology to quietly stun an entire populace insensate, cart them off, and process them. So why the conventional warfare, the screaming bloody deaths? Why the terror tactics, and the sadistic inflicting of unnecessary pain and suffering?

We take bloody combat so for-granted in games, it’s hard to remember just how bloody awful the Reapers are. They’re set up from the start as evil killing machines; if you do that, you can’t retcon them later into “we’re just trying to break the cycle, man.” They leave their captives alive and wait for them to regain consciousness before dissolving them, screaming.

No, it gets back to the basic flaws of the ending. The moment you meet the Starkid, you are in another game entirely. The first 2.9 are retconned away, and new motives, themes and goals are assigned. It doesn’t work. It was a bad last-minute change in direction, and we’ll never know why the writer(s) chose to abandon the story they’d been telling.

Well, like I say, the Reapers are presumably the creation, or at least the first Reaper was the creation – of a process something like the “Control” ending – with possibly the last member of a race that had seen most of its race wiped out and the remainder agonzingly rendered down into paste to create a Cthulhoid cybercuttlefish.

So, one could argue either or both of a) the Reapers know that looking terrifying and being terrifying – using monstrous reanimated corpses of the current cycle’s races, driving people mad, all that stuff – helps to break morale (see that race in the Prothean cycle who took to worshipping the Reapers as death gods and largely wiped themselves out as sacrifices. Job done!) and also causes division (are you really going to send your fleet to defend another race if it might mean being dissolved alive into DNA goo?). So, it’s efficient to be monsters from the id.

And it’s also fair to speculate that b) they are _insane_ – every one of them is hideously traumatized by the circumstances of their creation and the task they are now programmed to accomplish. After all, isn’t constantly repeating an irrational process (like genocide) one of the classic signs? It’s possible that their interest in Shepard is motivated in some way by a hope that the human Reaper (with Shepard as the motivating consciousness, overlaid by “destroy the cycle” programming) might help them to break the cycle, but I don’t really think so myself. I think Harbinger is just weird – as Mr Byrne says, he is the Prothean-derived Reaper, so he is from a race who were pretty unpleasant to start with, and has been possessing the genetically debased remains of his own race for millennia while collecting and experimenting on apex species… not, as you say, very nice.

The Catalyst is probably a slightly different kettle of fish, because it seems to be created _by_ rather than _from_ the Ur-Reaper race – and is a lot less moustache-twirling and evil-looking…

I think the Catalyst is a cardboard cut-out. They thought it would Cool and Mysterious and hey it worked for those other games and movies; let’s have a Mysterious Force come and Explain it All! All form, no substance. Nothing really behind it. The reason the Starjerk dismisses you with a “can’t explain, shut up,” is because there’s nothing TO explain.

We can paste the pieces together and come up with something moderately interesting, as long as we take some serious liberties with the glue we use. You’ve used some interesting glue. The Catalyst, I’m afraid, was just sniffing it.

Even then, I could have swallowed the Catalyst as some horrible lazy endgame device and moved on, if any of the ending connecting with the marketing. That sting still lasts; so much of what’s done in the game is tossed out the window, like all time spent preparing the Citadel. So many of the war assets you felt pretty good about accomplishing aren’t even mentioned at the end, let alone seen. The Rachni got cut completely. Even with all that, if one of the ending choices in any way meshed with the Shepard that had been written, I would have rolled my eyes at the Godbrat and never thought of it again.

It would have been a strange way to end a story, but if Option 4 was in all along, absolutely I would have, as an unsuspecting player, chosen it. Screw you, Catalyst; I choose neither IM nor Saren nor Geth-murder. If the Catalyst was a trick and all its choices were false, that would have been clever: subverting the cliche of the Deus Ex.

But we got neither. 4 ultimately unpalatable choices. I think Bioware lost sight of why we play games, just totally disconnected from it entirely. Several different paths could have either made the Starkid more acceptable, or even downright brilliant. But it completely lacked substance.

“Ah! Yes, good point on Harbinger. OK, so there is A.N Other Reaper who is the ur-Reaper, but I think the point holds.”

I like the idea of a geriatric Reaper, limping along behind the rest of the fleet with a cane in one tentacle and a long beard. ‘Youngesters today…’ He’d be muttering to himself. ‘Always rushing in, no patience…in my day Harvesting was an art, careful planning no rushing headlong into the fight…And look at that, you call that a husk? In my day husks were HUSKS…ten feet tall mindless drones that crapped bullets…’

“It would be absolutely _brilliant_ if Sovereign had said “We haven’t totally worked out our motivation yet, but the writers are definitely on it.”

Mine involved Shepard simply telling Sovereign she’d played Mass Effect 3. At which point the Reapers decided Humanity had suffered enough and left the galaxy alone.

“But this is a pretty easy one, I think. The Reapers have worked out that races are generally reluctant to be either wiped out or reduced to paste and turned into space kalamari.”

I was thinking on this, musing in my way about how the Reapers are in effect created by putting planetary populations into a blender. Then I recalled something about how, when they do this, the Reapers gain the collective knowledge of that species. Then it dawned on me that they require individuals to still be alive when Harvested.

So, the average Reapers earliest memories will be of several million people being shoved into a blender and turned into paste…I’m guessing that might leave them with a few issues.

“Whereas Shepard, quite correctly, just finds it profoundly annoying, because they are very old, very complex and very smart machines.”

I’m not sure the Reapers are that smart. Their plan A was to remotely control the Citidel relay, plan B was…errm…get allies, conduct a frontal attack on the Citidel and probably hope that whatever prevented the relay from working was something they could fix. In other words they totally failed to consider what they would do if the Citidel relay didn’t work – if Organics were as chaotic as they seemed to think then the logical thing to do is assume that at some point a species might end up destroying the Citidel rather than using it. When the Citidel relay didn’t activate on Sovereigns signal all his/its subsequent actions were basically improvised, rather than clear plans of action.

Not exactly a hallmark of astonishing intelligence at work methinks. You’d think they’d at least have placed a relay right out on the edge of the galaxy, rather than forcing themselves to fly all the way back. Or failing that started to move towards the galaxy when Sovereign was killed – rather than wait some 3 years while their minions built another Reaper and they sat there and ‘starved’*.

(*Vigil speculated that the Reapers went into hibernation to conserve energy between cycles. This presumably means that Reapers can die if they don’t ‘eat’)

“And a baby Reaper wouldn’t be much use – as was demonstrated, one hero protagonist with a Carnifex can take it out fairly easily, and the rest of the Reaper fleet would arrive before it matured to a usable size.”

We don’t know how long it takes for a Reaper to get to full size, and since they are machines they can presumably download information/memories to each other (which would thankfully probably bypass the Reaper equivelent of puberty) they would probably mentally mature VERY quickly indeed.

“Ah, but! What’s the thing which allows EDI to spread her wings in the first place? Joker. It takes a human to give EDI freedom of choice, and of course Joker is half-jokingly concerned while he is doing it that it is a terrible idea that will lead to the conquest of humanity by AIs.”

Good point, and also the source of one of my favourte ME2 quotes; ‘I enjoy the sight of humans on their knees…that was a joke’

“I like the idea that the Reapers were hoping that they could create a Reaper able to break the cycle… although I think that’s a bit metaphysical, even for me. They are certainly weirdly interested in Shepard, in particular – like Harbinger’s attempt to get hold of his body. Possibly there’s something specific about Shepard that has the capacity to liberate the Reapers from their current programming… but that, I think, _is_ headcanon territory.”

Certainly it seems to be beyond the capability of *some* Bioware writers to have considered or understood.

However Harbringers interest in Shepard would be explained in this context – Liara notes in the first game that Shepard had to be incredably strong-willed to have been able to handle the information the Prothean becon implanted without being driven insane (or at least mentally damaged – I forget the exact wording). The Reapers may have wanted Shepard to try and discover what caused this strong will, thinking that if they could harvest humans with the same traits it could result in a Reaper that was capable of overcoming its base programming.

Human Reaper are indeed special. Most Reapers shaped like cuttlefish( (Don’t know if this is pure laziness by the designers or intentional but earlier I’ve hoped to see space hamster Reaper) while Human Reaper keep most of his original species shape. Even in the end when he is completed and have tentacle as it ‘feet’, Human Reaper still retain 75% of its original species shape and perhaps their mind. It was always implied that human is unique, fast thinking, and dynamic.

If Drew Karpyshyn is the one who wrote for ME3, I think we would hear more about Human Reapers, its true purpose, and such. But again, the pairs of new writers throw all of them like a trash and Human Reapers never mentioned ever again. Which causing a logical flaw in ME story.